Ars Technicast, Episode 23–Ghosts of online services we abandoned

Forgotten and dead accounts tell us a lot about where the Internet was back then.

Over the years, most of us have left certain online services behind. We closed out some of our accounts and let others languish in the graveyard of the Internet. Today, we talk about the ghosts of those screen names past. Some of the services we talk about in this show include the original Hotmail, AOL, LiveJournal, and MySpace. Join our host, Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng, as well as Ars Contributors Andrew Cunningham and Casey Johnston, and Social Editor Cesar Torres in this look back at the things we abandoned as our lives grew more connected with the Internet.

Share with us your own stories of online services that you abandoned in the comments below. Also, if you enjoy the Ars Technicast and you happen to subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher, please leave us a review or comment in those places. Also, don't forget to take our poll below.

61 Reader Comments

I was on Delphi, but the only reason I joined was because they were the least expensive path to the Internet in my locale in 1994, offering text-based gopher and WWW, as well as telnet access, over a local POP dialup access. As soon as I had an alternative access method (in my case, dialup SLIP from a local University campus to my Slackware Linux box in later '94), I ditched the hourly metered Delphi.

"Other" - While it's close to the first option of the service becoming deserted, there's still the fact that an alternative service was more compelling leading to an individual's termination of service, not just being the only one left using it.

I for the most part gave up the ghost on LiveJournal years ago. But the other day I had a major change in my life and, on a whim, logged onto LJ and mentioned it. A friend who still uses his account there said "Well, it must be big if you bothered mentioning it here!"

I used to have an old LiveJournal, and a Geocities page. I stopped using both a long time ago! Mostly boredom, but also the fact that other things came along that required my time, which I have very little of.

I worked for AOL/AOL Canada, and those accts got closed once I escaped from there. I had an @home acct before they got taken over by Cox. Walked away from myspace years ago, hated then with a passion. Retired my LJ and DJ accts a few years ago, though I do miss the early LJ from back around '99-00. I had a hotmail aacct for about 3-6 months before MS bought them, then my MS hate at the time mandated I drop the acct with a vengeance in silent protest...ah youth.

I didn't vote, there's no "all of the above" or option to pick more than one. I've created and abandoned more accounts than I can count--especially when requiring an account just to download a file, or do just about anything, was all the rage. Want to download a file...create an account. Just want to report an error or say a simple "thank you"...create an account. Hell, reporting errors is even worse because some services have yet another system for error reporting that requires yet another account.

Anyone who's been online for very long will have left a long trail of abandoned accounts behind and any one of those options would apply at some point or another.

Old services I've dropped over the years? Geocities and Tripod for two. I said "Other" because I ended up getting my own Web space. A lot of people have mentioned ICQ, which was fine until AOL bought it. One I have seen mentioned is Heat, which surprises me. I had friends who made a killing on NetFighter, but I got in late and it became defunct soon after that.

Mostly, "Other." I've had subscriptions to almost every service over time; AppleLink, AOL, GEnie, Delphi, CompuServe, eWorld, and more I can't remember. many closed, were absorbed by others, or became irrelevant.

Perfect example was AOL. I was one of the first thousand members; matter of fact, I started with their predecessor, Personal AppleLink. A lifetime discount because of that kept me with them a long time, but they slowly faded away. First I didn't need their dialup; then they discontinued (or charged extra for) classified ads, personals, UseNet access, and more.

I still have my first AOL account, which I registered in 1994. Actually got a very simple name-initial-initial address, with no goofy numbers. I still use this account for various site registration and web purchase purposes.

I set up an AT&T WorldNet email address in 1997, which came with my dial-up internet service. That one's now managed through Yahoo, but it's still the very same address and I use it every day.

Hotmail. First thing I ever signed up for online. That was in 1996. I still use the exact same email address. There was a period where Hotmail went down hill and never really recovered but it got good enough that I just kept using it anyway. So yeah, I'm using the same Hotmail address from when I first got online.

I still use the same hotmail address. It's my first and last name, with no numbers or punctuation. I can't see why someone would give up an easy-to-remember email address with history. A well-established account that is easy to remember has a value that can't be made up for with bells and whistles in my opinion. To each their own I guess. That said, I've long since given up on controlling spam. I simply set it up to blacklist everything that isn't specifically whitelisted, and periodically skim my junk mail to make sure I didn't miss anything. It works for me.

I have, but rarely use, a LinkedIn account, they are turning into a 'professional' version of MySpace. You can endorse people now for their talents (ostensibly) and I've had friend requests from people I don't know, and from people that I know for a fact don't like me.

I'd dump it entirely, as it hasn't served a purpose for me in, well, ever

OMG, online? What about the old school past for some of us? FIDONET baby. Buffalo Creek's SFNET. Wildcat's World Server. PCBoard, Spitfire and so on and so on. Online? How quickly we forget. Running 200 members on a SX386 Wang, 20 MB HDD and 64K RAM. Yeah baby!

BBSs before the Internet took off. I had my own BBS on my 386 PC that Sports Illustrated downloaded a picture from to use in the magazine when there wasn't time to ship the photo to meet deadline.

Tried Prodigy for a short while, but jumped to GEnie quickly to get away from their per email charges. While on GEnie a writer for Byte Magazine, Tom Halfhill, recruited me into a photography discussion group which I still belong to more that 20 years later. He left long ago. In fact I own the domain and administer the mail list for the group to this day.

Next came AOL. I was one of their beta testers for an OS/2 client. It never made it out of beta. I jumped to CompuServe, even though it was something like $30 an hour. The OS/2 client that let you jump online and download and transmit messages, Golden Compass, was a fabulous piece of software for tis time. You could jump on and off in seconds and have all sorts of great discussions. My favorite forum was Canopus, dedicated to OS/2 fans. We even had a visit or two from IBM's CEO.

Finally I discovered the wide open Internet, cancelled AOL and CompuServe and only wistfully remember CompuServe fondly. The rest? Good riddance. - ARS being the best substitute for what I loved about CompuServe.

I still have my first AOL account, which I registered in 1994. Actually got a very simple name-initial-initial address, with no goofy numbers. I still use this account for various site registration and web purchase purposes.

I set up an AT&T WorldNet email address in 1997, which came with my dial-up internet service. That one's now managed through Yahoo, but it's still the very same address and I use it every day.

I don't have my first AOL accounts, since they were under my Dad's account. I do still have my AOL account from 1996 when I bought my first laptop($3000, I got a loan for that thing. ). I still get some minor emails that I haven't bothered to change, but gmail pulls it anyway so I don't need to go to the site anymore.

Interestingly enough, my first e-mail account was with Caremail (before it became Care2) that I created as part of a class project in learning about e-mail in middle school. I closed that account and went to a Hotmail one instead, and I still use it today (transitioned to Outlook.com). I still have an AOL account that's tied to my mom's voicemail subscription, so I can't get rid of it until she moves onto something else. I don't even remember the password to it.

The only service I left because it changed hands was Audiogalaxy because they shut down in January after Dropbox bought them. It was great to stream my music over the internet behind the unclassified network without much trouble. It was tied to my Facebook account and my college e-mail address that was deleted before I could change the e-mail associated with my account. Now, I'm using Subsonic, but I have to work on the certificate stuff before I can stream my music at work again.

I did leave Neopets after my freshmen year in high school. It was around that time that it became endless grinding and work just to manage the damn things between schoolwork and going to football practice. It was around that time that Neopets started going commercial anyway, so it was time to abandon it. Weird thing is I still get e-mails from Neopets.

Still using the hotmail account I got when I was in high school (although mostly as a spam catcher, now). Unlike other services that I abandoned, *coughMYSPACEcough* it's only gotten better with time.

MySpace was tragic. Bought by Rupert Murdoch, filled with intrusive ads some of which were borderline pornographic, and also became a giant spam pit ... and then reborn as a slow and kludgy music & entertainment service ... Eck, I feel dirty just thinking about it.

I still use the same hotmail address. It's my first and last name, with no numbers or punctuation. I can't see why someone would give up an easy-to-remember email address with history. A well-established account that is easy to remember has a value that can't be made up for with bells and whistles in my opinion. To each their own I guess. That said, I've long since given up on controlling spam. I simply set it up to blacklist everything that isn't specifically whitelisted, and periodically skim my junk mail to make sure I didn't miss anything. It works for me.

I've been using the same Hotmail for over 10 years as well and it still gets the job done well enough for me. Surprisingly, it's almost spam free, I get one to five spam mails per month usually and they all end up in my junk mail anyways. Here's hoping it stays that way.

GEnie, Compuserve and AOL that was really a DOS format if I recal with an interface that "looked" a bit like Windows. My favorite to use of the three was GEnie back in the 1992-1996 time period and their Aladdin software. It dialed in and downloaded all the book marked Round Tables I kept up and bbs forums plus checked my mail.

BBSs before the Internet took off. I had my own BBS on my 386 PC that Sports Illustrated downloaded a picture from to use in the magazine when there wasn't time to ship the photo to meet deadline.

Tried Prodigy for a short while, but jumped to GEnie quickly to get away from their per email charges. While on GEnie a writer for Byte Magazine, Tom Halfhill, recruited me into a photography discussion group which I still belong to more that 20 years later. He left long ago. In fact I own the domain and administer the mail list for the group to this day.

Next came AOL. I was one of their beta testers for an OS/2 client. It never made it out of beta. I jumped to CompuServe, even though it was something like $30 an hour. The OS/2 client that let you jump online and download and transmit messages, Golden Compass, was a fabulous piece of software for tis time. You could jump on and off in seconds and have all sorts of great discussions. My favorite forum was Canopus, dedicated to OS/2 fans. We even had a visit or two from IBM's CEO.

Finally I discovered the wide open Internet, cancelled AOL and CompuServe and only wistfully remember CompuServe fondly. The rest? Good riddance. - ARS being the best substitute for what I loved about CompuServe.

Man do I not miss those old price per hour schemes that it cost to be on GEnie, Compuserve and AOL at the start of the 1990s. All of them had free hours but then after that depending on which service you were on the costs could go up dramatically. I recall GEnie being $12.95 an hour from 08:00 until 18:00 after that it was $6.00 an hour and later on $3.00 an hour. Oh and if you couldn't find a local access node you could go through Sprint and pay an additional per hour of $2.00 dollars. The cheapest of the three was AOL, they gave more free hours and after that were cheaper per hour to be on. I kept Compuserve for a long time for work but they were indeed damn costly.

Cesar Torres / Cesar is the Social Editor at Ars Technica. His areas of expertise are in online communities, human-computer interaction, usability, and e-reader technology. Cesar lives in New York City.